Deported from Brazil? - continued

In the holding bay at Guarulhos Airport, I made friends with a Brazilian who had just been deported from the US after a seven-year overstay and a few months stay under lock and key. It didn’t bode well. He had no money to catch the bus into the city. I couldn’t help him, Blondie had taken all mine, plus the cards and was running around Sao Paulo airport with a deadline of the morning flight back to Lima. If she didn’t pay, I was out of Brazil and back to Lima with no money and no cards of my own. The Big Boss had been fuming that we’d arrived in Brazil with no money. I couldn’t make him understand the situation, especially with no cards on me. I could have shown him via my Online Banking that I had a fortune in credit, many thousands of reais, just waiting for my card to become usable again. He wasn’t interested. He was a humourless fella, neatly shaved beard, one hand permanently in his pocket, pushing his jacket behind in a completely affected Miami Vice pose. If he fancied himself and his title, I certainly didn’t fancy my chances of getting back into Brazil if he had anything to do with it.

I also had plenty of time to wonder if this had all been a cunning Blondie plan. Now I could finally understand why she had been going out with me. Her patience and planning had paid off with her freedom and the key to my credit fortune. I laughed admiringly at the thought that it might be true. I had to wait in the departure lounge with no news from the world outside, watching English football on the screens for hours on end. Such torture. Meanwhile a frazzled Blondie was spending the last of our cash in an internet cafe, reversing the charges to her friends and family to find somebody with a spare few hundred reais. The internet cafe is another of the frustrations of Brazil not considering foreigners – you need a CPF number to register there. No foreigners can use that internet cafe in Guarulhos Airport.

The drama continued without me as the only person we knew with the means to pay had to finish their supermarket shopping before heading to the local airport Policia Federal while it was still open. It was all skin of the teeth stuff, with faxes crossing Brazil even though payments wouldn’t officially go through for three more days. All I did was try not to fall asleep all day, just in case I missed somebody. Don’t worry, I did suffer a little though, getting on for 18 hours without food by the time my favourite man returned at some point early evening. His lack of a sympathetic expression meant that I didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t say anything either way, but beckoned me downstairs. He seemed to be chewing his chewing gum with more facial muscles than before, so it could have been because he was angry that my fine had been paid. Or was it because he’d found another flight back to Lima... He didn’t let on.

We walked through departures and down to immigration without a word being said, me wondering all the time whether it was to pick up my bag from the holding bay for check-in and tchau, ate mais Brasil! He motioned me towards the same girl that had looked at me quizzically 12 hours before, and she smiled, stamped my passport a few times and I was in. I walked out of the arrivals terminal with a relieved smile, remembering the first time I had arrived in Brazil at the same spot a few years before. I’d come out of the gate and there had been nobody to meet me, the moment when I realised that I had no addresses or phone numbers for my friends in Sao Paulo, and I could have been stuck at the airport waiting for them forever. This time, Blondie was there, she hadn’t run off with my cards. I was even happier to be back in Brazil than the first time I had arrived.

Deported from Brazil?

If I was one of the only happy people in Lima Airport on the start of the journey back to Brazil, with flight vouchers and a day of shopping and hotel spa under our belts to finish our Peru trip, all for free, the Gods of Travel didn’t allow me to be smug for very long.

I can’t say that it was a big surprise to be honest. An outstanding fine from a previous overstay that I thought I’d paid in Buenos Aires was not the problem - being unable to pay it in any way when arriving in Guarulhos early on a Saturday morning certainly was. Brazil has many ways when it does not consider things from the estrangeiro angle. I didn’t really deserve much favour, but there might be people in the same situation who do and they’ll be stuck too.

If you have any fine to pay on your return to Brazil for overstaying a visa, my first advice is to use another entry point. Certain other borders around the edge of Brazil are a little more lax, with late night arrivals met by a one-man immigration team typed into a system with one finger on an archaic computer that doesn’t look like it will be connected to any kind of network. Guarulhos Airport in Sao Paulo is not so accommodating, and one of the only places where you are certain to get stopped, all details being electronically processed and listed.

So having been stopped, what can you do? The first frustration is that you can’t pay the fine by card, which I was happy to do. Most people re-entering Brazil with a fine to pay are unlikely to have many reais on their person. The immigration team were quite friendly, certainly not what you would find at Heathrow or any of the big US airports, and accompanied us around the airport, even removing their pig-proof gasmasks. No joy though. The second frustration is that you cannot buy local currency at the cambio houses with foreign cards. Both of these could easily come with a credit card surcharge on top, problem solved, taxi caught outside, sat in the house an hour later. My problem was that the shopping spree in Lima had been paid for with cash, and the withdrawals only arrived in my account the following day. I couldn’t take any more cash out that whole day. You can’t use foreign currency either, so anybody arriving alone and without the necessary Brazilian money would not have any way of paying without being able to enter the arrivals terminal.

With no friends in Sao Paulo having easy access to the cash I needed help from further away. Something like this sounds like a job for Western Union, or any other money transfer company. For some reason they don’t seem to like having offices in the airport. The nearest one was in the area, but you try convincing a taxi driver to take you 2 miles down a highway where walking is impossible when he could be taking people right across the city instead. They refuse, point blank. After all the morning’s fun, Blondie would never be able to walk there in time before it closed at midday. I was totally stuck. It began to look like I was going to have to live in The Terminal, at least until the Monday. I laughed to myself as we returned, thinking that living in the airport for a couple of days would make a good little travel story for me, and I had no problem with that. Accompanied by my laptop and with English football on the departure lounge televisions, this would not be a big hardship.

Things took a turn for the worse when Blondie left to try and organise the money, and I had to return to the holding bay. The Big Boss had arrived and was shouting at the staff for letting me out and for not sending me back to Lima immediately. He wanted me out as soon as possible, and my nerves started to jangle as all of a sudden my time in Brazil looked like it was coming to an end...